These are key­words or tags that have been used in the stu­dio over the past few days. And for my talk, I have to add one more tag so it’ll be eas­i­er for you to under­stand where I come from and where I stand. It is online pri­va­cy, cen­sor­ship, secu­ri­ty, in the Middle East, and more specif­i­cal­ly in Iran. These are the tags that res­onate with me the most, and this is because they are the clos­est to me because the projects that I’ve worked on are very much relat­ed to these tags.

So why Iran? First of all, I am Iranian. My par­ents are from Iran. I was born in Germany, though. So I have some sort of a cul­tur­al con­nec­tion to that coun­try. And to answer that ques­tion prop­er­ly I have to go a lit­tle bit fur­ther into the past and tell you a lit­tle sto­ry.

We have to go back all the way to 2009. I don’t know if some of you may remem­ber this or not. This is the year where Iran had its pres­i­den­tial elec­tions that quick­ly turned into this mas­sive civ­il move­ment. And this move­ment hap­pened because against all expec­ta­tions the pres­i­dent at the time, Ahmadinejad, who was a hard­lin­er, defeat­ed his oppo­nent from the oppo­si­tion, Mousavi. And the peo­ple didn’t like that. The result of that was that mil­lions of peo­ple gath­ered in the streets of Iran. And you can see the col­or green here. This is a sym­bol­ic col­or for this move­ment, so this move­ment was called the Green Movement, or the Green Wave.

And this is what hap­pened offline in Iran as well, but it also hap­pened online. And not only in Iran. This is Neda, one of the count­less civil­ians who got shot and killed dur­ing the protest in Iran. Her death was one of the most ​“icon­ic” ones, and most viral ones if you want­ed to say that too. And it’s inter­est­ing to see that YouTube nev­er took down this video from the plat­form. Also, this year this death was cap­tured from two dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. So we have two videos of this death being record­ed. And it’s always kind of hard for me to see these videos over and over again. So apolo­gies for that, and also sor­ry if I made you sad with this. But I think it’s impor­tant to see. And also impor­tant for you to under­stand that this is what pissed me off. And this is also what made me do some­thing, not about this, but made me start think­ing about the fol­low­ing things.

The inter­est­ing thing about this is that Iranian pro­tes­tors with mobile phones and cam­eras, they start­ed to become cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists. As soon as the protests in Iran became more vio­lent, jour­nal­ists were kicked out of the coun­try. So we out­side of Iran had to rely on cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists who then report­ed about events like this over YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Not Twitter, not too much. But most­ly YouTube.

This also annoyed the Iranian author­i­ties. What they did was they restrict­ed the Internet even more than they would do nor­mal­ly. These web sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are nor­mal­ly cen­sored in Iran. So upload­ing a video like this takes you a long time first of all, because the Internet con­nec­tion speed in Iran is real­ly real­ly ter­ri­bly slow. And then if it’s cen­sored it means you need to have cir­cum­ven­tion tools in order to get on these web sites. So [for] this sort of con­tent to be online, I asked myself how the hell do they put this online this quick­ly? And how is it that the Iranian author­i­ties still also get to arrest blog­gers? And that is because dur­ing the protests, what they also did is the author­i­ties nev­er actu­al­ly switched off the Internet entire­ly because they want­ed to track down the peo­ple who upload these kinds of videos, which result­ed in a lot of arrests of ​“online activists” and ​“offline activists” as well.

So I got curi­ous, and I asked myself what is the Iranian Internet, and who is the Iranian user? I was pissed off enough, like I said, to take a step or to feel the urge to do some­thing. To feel the urge of mak­ing some­thing. And the thing that I real­ly want­ed to bring across was that cen­sor­ship is hap­pen­ing in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, where it’s being used to bring across infor­ma­tion, to make voic­es heard.

So what did I do? I applied for an MA at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam in Germany. I got accept­ed, and I start­ed find­ing out more, with­out know­ing what the end result should be. I’m a design­er, so I’m not a actu­al­ly a researcher, but I had to get in touch with a lot of oth­er peo­ple who knew a lot more than me. So I spoke to jour­nal­ists, activists, blog­gers, you name it. And then start­ed draw­ing the big­ger pic­ture in the way that I would under­stand it.

This is the infor­ma­tion pool. This is how I like to refer to it. And what I did here is that I start­ed clus­ter­ing and relat­ing the infor­ma­tion that I got. And then I start­ed sim­pli­fy­ing what you see here, even though it’s quite easy to under­stand, but even more boiled down.

So I start­ed struc­tur­ing it fur­ther. There’s a step between this and that, but I want to show you oth­er things as well. This is the end result, which answers the ques­tion for me about what the Iranian Internet is and who the Iranian user is. This visu­al­iza­tion basi­cal­ly drills through the var­i­ous fields of the Iranian Internet. And what I’m going to do now is to walk you through the dif­fer­ent pan­els.

This is the first pan­el, and it’s based on num­bers that I got. It’s basi­cal­ly telling you about the Internet pen­e­tra­tion in Iran and where you are con­nect­ed and where you’re not con­nect­ed. So peo­ple who are in urban areas, they are the only ones who have access to the Internet, to the infra­struc­tures of the Internet. And the num­ber of Internet users is not a num­ber you can rely on. You get dif­fer­ent num­bers from dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions and the gov­ern­ment itself, it tells you one thing a week from now and then two weeks lat­er they tell you a dif­fer­ent thing. So you can’t rely on the num­bers you get there. Instead of find­ing only one num­ber, I decid­ed to visu­al­ize the prob­lem and show the view­er of this project that there is intrans­paren­cy hap­pen­ing; there is a con­flict of num­bers.

The sec­ond pan­el is basi­cal­ly look­ing at the black part of the pre­vi­ous pan­el, which is where the con­nec­tion hap­pens [when] you’re online. This illus­trates what—the Internet is not a geo­graph­ic place, but if it was, what would it look like in the Iranian con­text? So if you look at this, in the core of this visu­al­iza­tion you have the so-called ​“halal Internet” which is a pure and cen­sored Internet that Iran is try­ing to achieve. The thick­er lines sym­bol­ize slow con­nec­tions. And the dark, big squares are the Iranian ISPs and the white ones are the ISPs that are not in Iran.

Then you go even fur­ther. You can see that there are gaps with­in these bor­ders, and so this is what we look at in the next pan­el, where I try to describe the two most com­mon cir­cum­ven­tion tools that peo­ple use to get to blocked con­tent. And those are VPN con­nec­tions and using a Tor brows­er to get online. Once you have that, what can you do?

I was look­ing at a real­ly small part of the blo­gos­phere. Here are only four sec­tions of it. So you have WordPress, Blogger, Iranian blog hosts, and pri­vate domains. The inter­est­ing thing about the Iranian blog hosts is that if you decide to put a blog online on an Iranian blog host, they have the author­i­ty of entire­ly delet­ing all your con­tent from one day to the oth­er if they are not hap­py with it. What they can’t do is to delete a blog on a non-Iranian blog host. So a lot of peo­ple decide to go on Blogger. One thing that is also inter­est­ing is that this is sliced into three dif­fer­ent loca­tions. The core is the peo­ple who are liv­ing inside Iran. The mid­dle one is peo­ple who have an unknown loca­tion. And the out­side one would be the peo­ple who live out­side Iran.

What was inter­est­ing with the small sam­ple of data that I had, I saw that a cou­ple of peo­ple out­side of Iran decid­ed to have blogs on Iranian blog hosts. That can have sev­er­al rea­sons. You either want to be able to have infor­ma­tion avail­able for peo­ple who are in the coun­try for a spe­cif­ic time. Say you’re an activist from out­side and you want to get infor­ma­tion inside. The eas­i­est way is to use an Iranian blog host. But that also means as soon as they see that you’re writ­ing crit­i­cal con­tent, they take your blog out. This is the way that I would like to think about those out­siders, but they could also just be hard­lin­ers them­selves or just curi­ous about [test­ing?] oth­er things.

Then I asked myself who are the peo­ple who are the online activists? Who are the peo­ple who are writ­ing these blogs, for exam­ple. This pan­el is look­ing at cyber-criminals as described by the author­i­ties in Iran. You can see five sto­ries here of peo­ple who have faced some trou­ble with the author­i­ties. The guy in the mid­dle [Omid Mir Sayafi], he was the first blog­ger who died in prison. What hap­pens to blog­gers and activists in Iran is that they just get treat­ed like crim­i­nals who mur­der peo­ple, peo­ple who rape, like actu­al crim­i­nals, real­ly real­ly hard­core crim­i­nals. And they get tor­tured. So for exam­ple Omid, he was arrest­ed twice. The con­tent that he wrote on his blog was just satir­i­cal poems, and he was writ­ing about music. That was all. So it’s super arbi­trary. You can’t real­ly pre­dict whether you fall under a spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria of the regime that makes you a dis­si­dent. Sometimes you don’t even know that you are a dis­si­dent, which is also real­ly painful.

The last pan­el would be to show where the pow­er comes from. What is the gov­ern­men­tal struc­ture that actu­al­ly makes the deci­sions of arrest­ing these peo­ple, or mak­ing laws, or con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing the stu­pid halal inter­net, right? I won’t go into detail because this is not made for the screen. This is made for exhi­bi­tion pur­pos­es. And I’m real­ly grate­ful for this cre­at­ing some noise. I just put it out and then real­ly quick­ly it gen­er­at­ed a lot of noise, which is awe­some. Which was exact­ly what I want­ed, because peo­ple start­ed talk­ing about this. And I think also it gen­er­at­ed noise because it was a con­ve­nient point in time to speak about Iran first of all, and about visu­al­iza­tions as well.

One thing that hap­pened after this, because this was an MA, it wasn’t made for the screen. There was nev­er an online ver­sion of this. A friend of mine said we need to do some­thing about this, we need to make this more acces­si­ble for peo­ple who aren’t in the space. He’s a film­mak­er and he put this into motion, and I’m going to show this to you now.

This is basi­cal­ly sum­ming up every­thing that I said before in just three min­utes. And it’s share­able online, which is great. And just a side­note, it won an award just recent­ly, final­ly. Thank you.

Help Support Open Transcripts

If you found this useful or interesting, please consider supporting the project monthly at Patreon or once via Square Cash, or even just sharing the link. Thanks.